Parenting and triggers

There is no text book for how to parent. Yet it’s the most precious and challenging “job” on the planet.

If you are a parent you realise that your healing journey is taken up a notch once you welcome a child into the world.

You probably have noticed that your children bring up your unresolved issues to the surface. Their behaviour, their emotions and personality can trigger things within you that you can’t explain. It’s no fault of their own. They are just being children.

These triggers come from mostly early implicit memories (unconscious memories) you hold in your body, cells, fascia and organs. It’s no news that the body keeps the memories of everything that happened to you. When these memories show up it can make you feel lost, confused, bringing up fear of not being a good enough parent.

It’s important to explore what is going on inside when we can’t cope with our children’s behaviours and emotions. But doing deep emotional work when there isn’t enough capacity in your nervous system can cause more dysregulation and confusion.

There are deep wounds causing the triggers/reactions, but trying to get to those wounds first will cause your survival strategies to come up full force. In other words, in trying to reach those wounds you will be hitting a wall of resistance instead.

So what to do?

Regulation on the nervous system level comes first.

• Building a sense of safety in your body.

• Discharge of fight/flight/freeze/shutdown incomplete responses within your nervous system.

• Building more capacity in your system.

These steps are key to enable you to hold space for the uncomfortable triggers within, at the same time as you hold the space for your children’s difficult emotions and challenging behaviours.

And once there is more capacity within your nervous system, deep emotions start to come up naturally, as the system is now able to process and integrate them.

Feel free to check my highlights, on Instagram, for more info on nervous system regulation. There is also a highlight titled “Parenting”.